Manoa research – University of Hawaiʻi System Newshttps://www.hawaii.edu/news
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 23:34:28 +0000en-US
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1 https://i2.wp.com/www.hawaii.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-UHNews512-1.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1Manoa research – University of Hawaiʻi System Newshttps://www.hawaii.edu/news
3232UH astronomy team helps confirm 2nd potential interstellar objecthttps://www.hawaii.edu/news/2019/09/12/astronomy-potential-interstellar-comet/
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 23:34:28 +0000https://www.hawaii.edu/news/?p=103185Hawaiʻi at Mānoa astronomers help confirm the discovery of a comet scientists believe may have originated from outside the solar system.]]>

Visitor Comet C/2019 Q4 as imaged by the Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope on Hawaiʻi Island on September 10, 2019. Credit: Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Interstellar Objects (ISO) team helped confirm the discovery of a comet scientists believe may have originated from outside the solar system.

A team from an observatory in Crimea first spotted the comet on August 30. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, worked with astronomers and the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center in Pisa, Italy, to obtain additional observations of the comet.

Researchers Karen Meech, Dave Tholen and the ISO team at the UH Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (IfA) observed the comet, refining its orbit and inferring that it is between 1.2 and 10 miles in diameter. Astronomers, including those at Maunakea telescopes, will continue observations to further investigate the comet and better identify the direction it came from.

The comet, C/2019 Q4, is expected to make its closest approach to Earth on December 28, at about 190 million miles.

An international team of almost 50 scientists, including University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa oceanography researcher Tobias Friedrich, analyzed one of the longest lake sediment records—more than 1,500 feet—from a European lake with a complete sediment succession spanning nearly 1.4 million years.

Research revealed that Lake Ohrid, located at the border between the republics of Albania and North Macedonia, first formed 1.36 million years ago. That makes it the oldest continuously existing lake in Europe, and allowed the team to reconstruct Mediterranean climate over the entire history of the lake in exquisite detail.

Lake Ohrid is famous for its exceptional biodiversity, with more than 300 unique (endemic) animal and plant species found nowhere else in the world. The collaborative project aimed to obtain new information about the age and origin of the lake, the climate history of the northern Mediterranean region, and the reasons for the high degree of endemism and biodiversity.

“Once we realized that we had recovered one of the longest and most complete lake sediment records to date, our team was blown away,” said lead author Bernd Wagner at the University of Cologne (Germany).

By analyzing the sediment core for the type and amount of pollen and carbon contained in its many layers, researchers were able to reconstruct swings in temperature and rainfall through time. With this, the team had high-resolution and independently dated climate and fossil data from the Mediterranean region.

Computer models reconstruct past climate

Friedrich, whose expertise at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) is computer modeling of past and future climate, ran computer simulations of Earth’s past glacial cycles that account for ocean and atmospheric conditions and estimates of vegetation in the Mediterranean region.

The team could then compare changes in climate and rainfall through time as indicated by two separate sources—sediment records and computer modeling.

“Deriving a climate reconstruction for 1.36 million years with this quality and resolution is a miracle in itself,” said oceanography researcher Friedrich. “The fact that the results of my computer climate modeling agreed very well with the reconstruction is another miracle.”

The team’s research has now identified several key avenues by which ringed molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, can form in space.

PAHs—which also occur on Earth in emissions and soot from the combustion of fossil fuels—could provide clues to the formation of life’s chemistry in space as precursors to interstellar nanoparticles.

The study ultimately showed how these chemical processes could lead to the development of carbon-containing graphene-type PAHs and 2D nanostructures. Graphene is a one-dimensional layer of fused hexagons consisting of carbon atoms.

“This is something that people have tried to measure experimentally at high temperatures for decades but have not done successfully before,” said Musahid Ahmed, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division. “ We believe this is yet another pathway that can give rise to PAHs.”

Kaiser added, “The present experiment clearly provides scientific evidence that reactions between radicals at elevated temperatures do form aromatic molecules such as naphthalene.”

The latest study is part of an ongoing effort of the Hawaiʻi-Berkeley-Florida team to retrace the chemical steps leading to the formation of complex carbon-containing molecules in deep space up to all-carbon-containing soccer-shaped buckyball molecules.

The University of Hawaiʻi attracted $421.8 million in extramural funding in fiscal year 2019 (FY2019), topping $400 million for the first time in four years. That is a 9.2 percent increase over the $368.3 million in extramural funding UH brought in last year. Extramural funding is external investments from governmental agencies, industries and non-profit organizations that support research and training activities by university faculty and staff.

The research and innovation supported by the funding help to increase knowledge and provide solutions to improve the quality of life in Hawaiʻi and around the world.

Funding increases were seen at every level of UH, from community colleges to all three four-year campuses.

UH System: $48.3M—35.8 percent increase

UH Mānoa: $314.5M—4.5 percent increase

UH Hilo: $17.1M—32.7 percent increase

UH West Oʻahu: $8.2M—36 percent increase

UH Community Colleges: $33.6M—9.7 percent increase

In federal funding alone, UH brought in $280.4 million in FY2019, an increase of more than $30 million from the previous fiscal year’s tally of $247.7 million.

“During the last few years, the University of Hawaiʻi, like most research institutions across the country, has had to endure the ebbs and flows in the extramural funding arena,” UH Vice President for Research and Innovation Vassilis L. Syrmos said. “In spite of this difficult environment, the dedication and hard work of our faculty, support staff and students all contributed to making FY2019 end on a high note for the UH research enterprise.”

Programs and personnel attracting the attention of funders include:

Five junior researchers at UH Mānoa, who received an award of $10.4 million from the National Institutes of Health’s Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence. The funding supports the first center focusing on the interface between environmental microbiomes and human health.

UH West Oʻahu, which received $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation’s Tribal Colleges and Universities Program for its Pūkoʻa Kani ʻĀina project. The project will enhance STEM education and create a STEM ecosystem at UH West Oʻahu by providing a STEM pipeline from high schools, community colleges and from its own campus to careers and post baccalaureate education.

UH Maui College, which received a $1 million award from the National Science Foundation for its Project Kaihuwaʻa. The program aims to increase the academic success of low-income, talented students and improve overall retention, graduation and transfer rates.

About UH research

Research conducted by UH impacts the quality of life in the islands and around the world. As the state’s major research university, and because of Hawaiʻi’s tremendous geographic diversity, UH plays a prominent role in the state’s economic growth and development through its diverse and world-renowned research and innovation programs in astronomy, earth and ocean sciences, medicine and tropical agriculture.

UH Mānoa, the flagship campus of UH’s ten-campus system, is one of 115 universities, out of the 3,000 nationwide, to hold the distinction of being a Carnegie Research 1 university.

UH Mānoa is currently ranked 52 out of the top 400 public institutions of higher education when it comes to total research and development expenditures—federal government, state and local government, business, non-profit organizations and institutional sources. That’s according to the most recent National Science Foundation Higher Education Research & Development Expenditures Survey.

]]>Are black holes made of dark energy?https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2019/09/09/black-holes-dark-energy/
Tue, 10 Sep 2019 02:41:06 +0000https://www.hawaii.edu/news/?p=102796UH Mānoa researchers have identified and corrected a subtle error that was made when applying Einstein’s equations to model the growth of the universe]]>

Objects like Powehi, the recently imaged supermassive compact object at the center of galaxy M87, might actually be GEODEs. The Powehi GEODEs, shown to scale, would be approximately 2/3 the radius of the dark region imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. This is nearly the same size expected for a black hole. The region containing Dark Energy (green) is slightly larger than a black hole of the same mass. The properties of any crust (purple), if present, depend on the particular GEODE model. (Photo credit: EHT collaboration; NASA/CXC/Villanova University)

Two University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers have identified and corrected a subtle error that was made when applying Einstein’s equations to model the growth of the universe.

Physicists usually assume that a cosmologically large system, such as the universe, is insensitive to details of the small systems contained within it. Kevin Croker, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Joel Weiner, a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, have shown that this assumption can fail for the compact objects that remain after the collapse and explosion of very large stars.

“For 80 years, we’ve generally operated under the assumption that the universe, in broad strokes, was not affected by the particular details of any small region,” said Croker. “It is now clear that general relativity can observably connect collapsed stars—regions the size of Honolulu—to the behavior of the universe as a whole, over a thousand billion billion times larger.”

Croker and Weiner demonstrated that the growth rate of the universe can become sensitive to the averaged contribution of such compact objects. Likewise, the objects themselves can become linked to the growth of the universe, gaining or losing energy depending on the objects’ compositions. This result is significant since it reveals unexpected connections between cosmological and compact object physics, which in turn leads to many new observational predictions.

One consequence of this study is that the growth rate of the universe provides information about what happens to stars at the end of their lives. Astronomers typically assume that large stars form black holes when they die, but this is not the only possible outcome. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis that very large stars should collapse into what could now be called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These appear to be black holes when viewed from the outside but, unlike black holes, they contain Dark Energy instead of a singularity.

In 1998, two independent teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, consistent with the presence of a uniform contribution of Dark Energy. It was not recognized, however, that GEODEs could contribute in this way. With the corrected formalism, Croker and Weiner showed that if a fraction of the oldest stars collapsed into GEODEs, instead of black holes, their averaged contribution today would naturally produce the required uniform Dark Energy.

The results of this study also apply to the colliding double star systems observable through gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration. In 2016, LIGO announced the first observation of what appeared to be a colliding double black hole system. Such systems were expected to exist, but the pair of objects was unexpectedly heavy—roughly five times larger than the black hole masses predicted in computer simulations. Using the corrected formalism, Croker and Weiner considered whether LIGO-Virgo is observing double GEODE collisions, instead of double black hole collisions. They found that GEODEs grow together with the universe during the time leading up to such collisions. When the collisions occur, the resulting GEODE masses become four to eight times larger, in rough agreement with the LIGO-Virgo observations.

Croker and Weiner were careful to separate their theoretical result from observational support of a GEODEs scenario, emphasizing that “black holes certainly aren’t dead. What we have shown is that if GEODEs do exist, then they can easily give rise to observed phenomena that presently lack convincing explanations. We anticipate numerous other observational consequences of a GEODEs scenario, including many ways to exclude it. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.”

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) presented results of a five-year study that showed hula significantly reduced hypertension in Native Hawaiian participants. The results were presented September 7, at the American Heart Association national meeting.

JABSOM researchers recruited 263 Native Hawaiians in nine communities on three islands. All were given three-hour sessions of hypertension education that included information on diet, exercise and the use of medications. Then, participants were randomly assigned to a control group that received no additional intervention, or to a hula intervention.

Hula participants attended one-hour group hula classes twice a week for three months, followed by one monthly lesson for three additional months with self-directed practice, as well as group activities to reinforce hypertension education and healthy behaviors. All participants continued their usual medical treatment during the study.

Those who participated in the program incorporating hula lowered their blood pressure far below what those who were not assigned to the hula intervention were able to accomplish. They significantly reduced their 10-year risk of getting heart disease and they were able to sustain improvements in their blood pressure after one-year —which was six months after the study’s hula classes ended. The participants reduced their systolic (top number) blood pressure by an average of 17 points.

“I don’t want to say I would be dead, but I would have probably had a heart attack or stroke by now, because I know exactly what I didn’t do,” said Arma Oana, a study participant. “I didn’t exercise until I came to the program. I didn’t think I could.”

Principal investigator for the study Keaweʻaimoku Kaholokula, chair of the medical school’s Department of Native Hawaiian Health (DNHH), said his researchers have found that Native Hawaiians want group-based and culturally relevant lifestyle interventions that resonate with their cultural values and perspectives.

“Hula is fun, it’s something you can do at an older age as well as a young age,” said Kaholokula. “It can be adjusted, modified for people with different physical capacity. You can do the Merrie Monarch competition duck walks for younger people and you can do the slower, gentle side-to-side (motion) for older folks; so I think it’s a type of physical activity that makes sense, that we can really use for health promotion.”

Co-Investigator Mele Look emphasized that more than just the hula movements was at work improving the participants’ health.

“What the kumu hula (teachers of hula) have been telling us is that hula integrates your mind, body and spirit. The hula environment creates really strong social connections between the kumu and the participant and the participants with each other, and all that together helped reinforce them to make changes in their lifestyle; maybe improve their commitment to taking their medications, inspire them to continue practicing the hula, even the stress management component—knowing you have friends supporting you,” said Look, DNHH director of community engagement. “Hula is great for your health, mind, body and spirit.”

Ten kumu hula were involved in the study, guided by Mapuana de Silva from Hālau Mōhala ʻIlimia, who partnered with the researchers. Six community organizations joined the study, named The KaHOLO Project. Before the research was presented to the American Heart Association in New Orleans on September 7, the researchers met with participants in Hawaiʻi to inform them of the results and congratulate them on their success.

One of the study participants, Luana Albino of Waimānalo said, “When I lost my first two pounds I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve been trying forever to lose weight and I couldn’t.’ I saw my blood pressure and diabetes (go down).”

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. DNHH is the only clinical department within an accredited U.S. medical school specifically dedicated to the health of an indigenous people. Its researchers believe being asked to share their findings at the heart association convention is an acknowledgement of their work and a sign that health officials nationwide are realizing that to improve health in minority populations it helps to address those populations in ways that are culturally relevant to them, ways that meet them where they are in their communities.

“This study is a great example of how interventions can be more effective when they are tailored for cultural relevance to participants,” said the American Heart Association’s Chief Medical Officer for Prevention Eduardo Sanchez. “Not only are individuals achieving health-promoting levels of physical activity, they are also having fun, engaging in a valued cultural practice, and connecting with their community in the group classes—all important for well-being. This is an approach that can easily be applied to other groups and dancing styles, such as ballroom dancing, line dancing or salsa dancing, and supports the American Heart Association’s philosophy to meet people where they are to help them live longer, healthier lives.”

Kaholokula, lead study author, said partners in the study already are hoping to convince health insurance companies to offer coverage similar to that currently offered for gym memberships for certified programs that incorporate hula to reduce heart disease.

Participants of the KaHOLO study dance hula at a gathering to celebrate the findings of the research.

When Kīlauea Volcano erupted in 2018, it injected millions of cubic feet of molten lava into the nutrient-poor waters off Hawaiʻi Island. The lava-impacted seawater contained high concentrations of nutrients that stimulated phytoplankton growth, resulting in an extensive plume of microbes that was detectable by satellite.

Now a study led by researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and University of Southern California (USC) revealed that this biological response hinged on unexpectedly high concentrations of nitrate, despite the negligible amount of nitrogen in basaltic lava. The research team determined that nitrate was brought to the surface of the ocean when heat from the substantial input of lava into the ocean warmed nutrient-rich deep waters and caused them to rise up, supplying the sunlit layer with nutrients.

“UH has a strong tradition of not only volcanic research, but also looking at its impacts on the surrounding environment such as the ocean, groundwater and atmosphere,” said co-lead author Sam Wilson in the UH Mānoa Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE). “This latest piece of research improves our understanding of lava-seawater interactions within the much broader context of land-ocean connections.”

Rapid response expedition

After observing the phytoplankton bloom in satellite images, C-MORE organized a rapid response oceanographic expedition on the UH research vessel Kaʻimikai-O-Kanaloa from July 13–17, 2018—during the thick of Kīlauea’s activity. The team conducted round-the-clock operations in the vicinity of the lava entry region to test water chemistry and the biological response to the dramatic event.

C-MORE’s Wilson and co-lead researcher Nick Hawco, a USC researcher who will be joining the UH Mānoa oceanography department in January 2020, tested the hypothesis that lava and volcanic dust would stimulate microorganisms that are limited by phosphate or iron, which are chemicals found in lava.

As it turned out, since there was so much lava in the water, the dissolved iron and phosphate combined into particles, making those nutrients unavailable for microbes. In addition, deep and heated seawater became buoyant, and brought up nitrate which caused other classes of phytoplankton to bloom.

Land-ocean connections

It is possible that this mechanism has led to similar ocean fertilization events in the past associated with the formation of the Hawaiian Islands and other significant volcanic eruptions, the authors suggest. Depending on their location, sustained eruption on this scale could also facilitate a large flux of nitrate from the deep ocean and perturb larger scale ocean circulation, biology and chemistry.

“The expedition in July 2018 provided a unique opportunity to see first-hand how a massive input of external nutrients alters marine ecosystems that are finely attuned to low-nutrient conditions,” said Wilson. “Ecosystem responses to such a substantial addition of nutrients are rarely observed or sampled in real time.”

Added Dave Karl, senior author and co-director of the UH Mānoa Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE), “Science is a team sport. SCOPE emphasizes collaboration, where scientists with complementary skills came together to complete this unique, interdisciplinary project.”

In the future, the team hopes to sample the newly-formed ponds at the bottom of the Halemaʻumaʻu crater and further investigate lava-seawater interactions in the laboratory.

]]>Breast cancer early detection research awarded $2.8 millionhttps://www.hawaii.edu/news/2019/08/29/jabsom-deng-breast-cancer-grant/
Fri, 30 Aug 2019 02:17:43 +0000https://www.hawaii.edu/news/?p=102233JABSOM’s Youping Deng and his team are doing promising work in the development of a new diagnostic tool to improve the early detection of breast cancer. ]]>

Youping Deng

A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa scientist has been awarded a $2.8 million grant to advance his promising work in advanced technology to drastically improve the early detection of breast cancer.

Youping Deng of the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) said his preliminary studies have identified a panel of fat-soluble molecules in the blood (lipids) that were able to distinguish early stage cancer from benign lesions with over 90 percent accuracy.

“Mammography is the current gold standard for breast cancer screening, however, most women with abnormal mammograms are eventually found not to have breast cancer,” said Deng, director of JABSOM Bioinformatics Core. “Most abnormal mammograms are false positives that require expensive breast imaging and biopsies, which can cause psychological distress.”

With the new investment by the National Institutes of Health, Deng’s aim is to identify signatures of circulating lipids and microRNA (small cellular RNA fragments that affect how genes work). These signatures can then be used reliably as a companion diagnostic tool to screening mammography, which would reduce the number of unnecessary follow-up investigations, especially invasive biopsy.

Deng and his team employ artificial intelligence and computational equations in their research. The hope is that development of a new diagnostic tool can be applied to other forms of cancer detection, including lung cancer, thereby potentially saving many lives through earlier and more accurate diagnosis.

“Providing cancer clinical trials and cancer patient care for both adults and children gives Hawaiʻi residents the opportunity for the most effective treatments without having to leave the islands,” said Jeffrey Berenberg, a UH Cancer Center professor and principal investigator for the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP).

Out of 46 NCORP sites, the UH Cancer Center is one of only 14 designated Minority/Underserved Community Sites where the patient population is comprised of at least 30 percent racial/ethnic minorities or rural residents. The center has been a member of the program (and its earlier version, called the Minority-Based Community Clinical Oncology Program) since 1994.

“This designation helps the UH Cancer Center increase cancer clinical trial accruals of underrepresented populations in Hawaiʻi,” said UH Cancer Center faculty Jared Acoba, an NCORP Minority/Underserved Community Site principal investigator. “Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Asians represent a small fraction of patients enrolled in cancer clinical trials nationwide. It is critical to enhance access to the highest level of quality cancer care to these patients.”

In January 2019, the UH Cancer Center expanded its geographic cancer coverage, with NCI approval, to the Family Health Plan Health Center in Guam.

“One of the unique aspects of Hawaiʻi Minority/Underserved NCORP is that it includes research studies to improve cancer care delivery, an area that the UH Cancer Center, along with its clinical partners, has excelled at since the program’s inception,” said Randall Holcombe, UH Cancer Center director and an NCORP principal investigator.

“Our results demonstrate that the effect of Antarctic melting and icebergs need to be included in computer model simulations of future climate change,” said Fabian Schloesser, SOEST researcher and lead author of the study. “Climate models currently used in the sixth climate change assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do not account for this process.”

While the impact of climate change is causing some of the shelf to break up, the icebergs floating away from the continent may actually help slow down warming in the Southern Hemisphere.

Added Axel Timmermann, corresponding author of the study and director of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Climate Physics in South Korea, “Our research highlights the role of icebergs in global climate change and sea level rise. Depending on how quickly the West Antarctic ice sheet disintegrates, the iceberg effect can delay the effects of global warming in cities such as Buenos Aires and Cape Town by 10–50 years.”

Computer simulations reveal cooling effects

The research team ran a series of global warming computer simulations, which included the freshwater and cooling effects of icebergs on the ocean. The size and number of icebergs released in their model mimic the gradual retreat of the Antarctic ice sheet over a period of several hundred years.

By turning on and off the “iceberg effect” in their climate model, the researchers discovered that icebergs can significantly slow down human-induced warming in the Southern Hemisphere, impacting global winds and rainfall patterns.

With projected future shrinking of the Antarctic ice sheet, scientists expect an intensification of iceberg discharge. Icebergs can persist for years and are carried by winds and currents through the Southern Ocean until they reach warmer waters and ultimately melt. The melting process cools ocean waters like ice cubes in a water glass. Furthermore, freshwater discharge from icebergs impacts currents by lowering ocean salinity. Whether this “iceberg effect” can slow down or alter future climate change in the Southern Hemisphere has remained an open question.